by The Cool War
Alys took his hand. “Horny?”
He looked around, irritated. “What?”
“Take me along.”
He was so startled that he forgot about being irritated. •That’s ridiculous, Alys!”
“No, it isn’t ridiculous.”
“It’s impossible.”
“It isn’t impossible, either. If you can cook up documents for yourself, you can cook them up for me, too. And Leota was my friend longer than she was yours.”
“Just forget it, Alys. It’s dangerous.”
She leaned forward shyly and rested her cheek against his. “It’s also thrilling, Horny. Do you know what you’re talking about? Just my lifelong secret dream, that’s all. Sheiks that carry their women off on white steeds. Real men!”
“More likely to carry somebody off on a hydrogen buggy,” he snarled. “And those real men do funny things to their real women.”
“Oh, Horny.” She moved back and looked at him fondly. “Dear Horny, is it possible that you don’t think I can handle a man? Trust me in that, if in nothing else. So I regard the matter as settled. I’ll give you a hand with the documents… only, Horny? There’s one thing about the class I taught in Sunday school. Jim Tally taught the art. I was their judo coach. But if Jessie Tunman can forge a passport, I can too.”
XII
The elderly Egyptian pilot twisted in his seat, bawling something. He was pointing down at the desert, and, although Hake’s rusty Arabic had been coming back to him, most of what the man said was lost. “Drive the airplane,” Hake ordered. From the way the Egyptian handled the little prop-jet Hake suspected he had got his first flight training in MIGs, from Soviet advisors before the Yom Kippur war.
“What’s he trying to tell us?” Alys asked in Hake’s ear.
Hake shrugged. “Something about the wind being bad. I think it’s about that stuff down there.” They both craned to look down. The Empty Quarter was empty, all right: rocky desert, not even a herd of goats or the black tents of a Bedouin camp. But parts of the ground were queerly colored, brownish green and strangely out of focus, as if an oily fog lay over the scraggly bushes.
“I wish this plane had a bathroom,” Alys said irritably. She was playing the part of a bored American tourist extremely well: pretty; well dressed, in her three-piece gray shorts-suit with a puff of scarlet silk at her throat. It was a wholly unsuitable costume for the Empty Quarter, but for that reason all the more suitable for someone who wanted to look like a tourist.
Her fidgety boredom probably was not altogether an act, Hake thought. Likely enough, she was having second thoughts about this adventure. The night before in the Cairo hotel, both of them out of it with jet-lag and fatigue, she had lain rigid beside him in the immense king-sized bed. When he had moved to touch her, more out of compassion than lust, she had jerked angrily away. He could understand her qualms. The closer they got to Abu Magnah, the more his own qualms surfaced. What had looked easy from half a world away looked more and more daunting at first hand.
“What’s that idiot doing now?” she demanded.
The pilot had unstrapped himself, leaving the controls untended, and was staggering back toward them. In Egyptian Arabic he shouted, “The oasis is coming up in just a minute. Did you see the locusts?” Hake turned to peer back along their course, but the sweep of the wing blocked his view. “Too bad you missed it,” grinned the pilot. “Now fasten your seat belts. If God wills it, we are about to begin our descent into the landing pattern.” He returned to his seat and a moment later, as he took over from the autopilot, the plane dipped one wing and began to circle to the left.
As the undercarriage rumbled and locked in the landing position, Hake got his first glimpse of Abu Magnah. It was much more than he expected. It looked like the interlocking-circles symbol for the Olympic games, but on a huge scale—immense disks as much as a mile across. They were ‘irrigation circles, and where they interlocked was no cluster of tents and palms but a city. Wide roads threaded. in between the farm plots, almost bare of traffic.
It had been Hake’s notion that Abu Magnah was a private pleasure dome of Sheik Hassabou’s. It was bigger than that. At least fifty snow-white, dome-shaped buildings were laid out in city blocks; minarets and mosques in white and gold and darker colors; a sprawling building like two dominoes joined together with a hotel sign on top of it, and, out in the farm circles, surrounded by walls, two or three story-book palaces, with pools and gardens. All in all, it was daunting. And quite new. There were few trees, because Abu Magnah was not yet old enough for trees, though a bright green pattern of seedlings showed where pine groves would be one day, and a scattering of gray-green promised olives. At the edge of one huge circle north of the city, dark brown and damp earth only lightly flecked with the beginnings of a crop of some kind, there was a rectangular tower taller than any of the minarets. Scaffolding showed that it was still under construction. Then the airplane dipped and twisted, and a runway was rushing up to meet them.
They went through the haphazard customs formalities, and the pilot was waiting for them at the hotel van. “Pay me now, please,” he said.
“No. Why?” asked Hake. “You still have to take us south.”
“But if you pay me here with your credit card it will be in the sheik’s currency, which is tied to the Swiss franc. Besides, how do I know you will not go off without paying?”
“Well—” said Hake, annoyed, but Alys Brant moved in between them.
“Not a chance,” she said firmly, and tugged Hake into the van. “Oh, Horny,” she sighed, settling herself, “you do let people impose on you. You must have a lot of personal charm, why else would I have let you talk me into this crazy scheme?”
With an effort, he didn’t answer. He clamped his jaw and stared out of the van window. There was not much traffic apart from themselves—none at all to pass, except for a huge machine that looked like a snow-removal truck but turned out to be a sand-sweeper. But the wide road was banked like an autostrada. If it was not used often, at least it was used when drivers wanted to go fast. And as they passed one of the walled compounds, borne on the hot wind through the open windows of the hotel van, Hake heard what sounded like rushing water. A waterfall? How preposterous, in the middle of the Empty Quarter!
How formidable, too. He was surrounded by evidences of wealth and power, and who was he to oppose them? Not to mention that formidable power he worked for, with whom he would sooner or later have to reckon.
“Ahlan wa-sahlan,” said the formally dressed clerk at the registration desk, offering a pen.
“Inshallah,” responded Hake politely. He signed in, one eye on the signature on his passport to make sure he had it right, and they were conducted to their suite. They had three bellmen to carry their four small pieces of luggage— “I must do some shopping,” Alys whispered in the elevator —and all of them fussed about, opening and closing drapes, trying gold-plated taps in the bath, adjusting the air-conditioners until Hake handed them each a flfty-riyal coin. He closed the door behind them, stood thoughtfully for a moment, and then began to rummage in bureau drawers until he found, first, a copy of the Q’ran, and then what he was looking for: a leather-bound, gold-stamped little volume that was the telephone directory for Abu Magnah. The curlicued script was easy enough to read, surfacing in his mind out of childhood memories as he needed it. But he wasn’t actually reading it. He didn’t exactly know what he was looking for, and what he was mostly seeing was the tenuousness of his plans. 1, go to Abu Magnah. 2, rescue Leota. 3, figure out what to do next. Even as an overall strategic intention it lacked focus. And tactically… where did one begin with step 2? The rescue had seemed even possible, back in Long Branch, as if all he would have to do was go to the local police station and report a kidnapping. But in this oasis town, fiefdom of Hassabou and his relatives, that was not even a hope.
Alys emerged from the bathroom, smiled at him and began to unpack: her cosmetics in a row on the mirrored dressing table, her toil
etries in the bath, her clothes in the top drawers of the largest chest. “If you’ll give me one of your credit cards,” she said, “I’ll get whatever else I need this afternoon. You can put your own stuff in that other bureau.”
“Don’t get settled in,” he said. “We’re only going to be here three days at most.”
“But we might as well be comfortable while we’re here. Don’t worry, Horny. I can whisk all this stuff back in the bags in two minutes—after you figure out what we’re going to do, I mean.”
“Fine.” He got up and gazed out the window. Hot as it was, the streets were full of people, a League of Nations of the Arab world. Some of them might help, mightn’t they? A little baksheesh, a clever play on old blood feuds—he could see Jordanians and Yemenis, even an Ait Haddibou Berber in white burnoose and headdress. All he had to do was figure the right ones to approach. His previous experience as a spy-saboteur was not much help; it had led him to a sort of James Bond conviction that somewhere along the road from the airport, or in the lobby of the hotel, some swarthy Levantine merchant or deferential tiny Anna-mese sailor would beg a ride, or ask for a light, and turn out to be an ally. It had not worked out that way. He was on his own.
“What’s this stuff, Horny?” Alys had finished her own unpacking and started on his. She was investigating the jumble at the bottom of the bag, lock pick and electronic teasers, code books, the rest of Art’s tapes, a stiletto.
“Tools of the trade. Just leave them.”
She sighed with pleasure. “You do lead a fascinating life.” She put them in a drawer, hung up his shirts and sat down to regard him brightly. “Let me see,” she said. “Since you’re the expert spy, I’m sure you’ve got a plan all worked out for what we’re going to do next but, just for practice, let me see if I can figure it out. Since we’re pretending to be tourists, we’d better tour. We can look this place over, and that way we can see how to get at Leota. They must have some nice picture postcards in the lobby. Maybe a map. I’ll bet we can piece together quite a lot of information, just by sightseeing and so on. And then, by tonight, we’ll be in a position to make a plan. Am I right?”
Hake studied her innocent face for a moment, then grinned. “My very thoughts,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Where the two wings of the hotel joined, the architect had placed a revolving roof dining room. They ate in the turret that night, and as the restaurant turned Hake could see the sheik’s palace, floodlit in pink and blue under the bright desert night sky. Now that they had seen it close at hand, it looked more formidable than ever. ,. but maybe, Hake thought, he was just tired.
It had been a tiring day. Alys had found postcards and maps easily enough. After ten fruitless minutes talking about tour buses with the concierge—none of them went to the right places, and Hake could not find a way of explaining what the right places were without giving away more than he wished—they had walked out the hotel door and been besieged by taxi drivers, thrilled with the notion of being hired for an afternoon’s sightseeing. Hake picked a displaced Moslem Armenian named Dicran (least likely to notice anything strange about his Arabic, while he was still practicing it), and they had driven around for three hours. Dicran’s over-the-shoulder commentary was a gloss of what he considered the romantic and strange—white Mughathir camels swinging along, ridden by the local police; mosques for Sunni, Shiite and Alawaite Moslems, churches for Druses, Dervishes and, yes, even Christians. And he had been proud to show them Sheik Hassabou’s palace on request. They drove along the farm highway that ran past its walls, and Dicran confided in them, smirking, about the electrified fences inside what looked like green hedges around the harem. Not to mention infrared alarms and armed guards at all the entrances. He had insisted they visit an aipursuq—Hake had puzzled over the word for a while, then laughed as he recognized “supermarket”—to buy local cucumbers, pomegranates and figs, and they had picnicked on real grass, just across the road from the palace itself. Dicran had been a mine of information. But, when you put it all together, how much closer were they to rescuing Leota? Or even to making a plan?
Not much.
But here, in public, with the headwaiter bringing them immense old-fashioned menus, they couldn’t talk about it anyway. And there was always the chance he would think of something. As the waiter strolled gracefully away Alys giggled and leaned closer to Hake. “He’s wearing eye shadow!” she hissed. -
“That’s kohl, Alys. It doesn’t mean he’s gay. They need it to protect their eyes from the sun.”
“At night?” She winked and returned to the menu.
She at least was having a good time, especially when she glanced up over the menu at Hassabou’s pink and blue palace, and seemed almost to stop breathing. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. There was something about the idea of being held so closely that thrilled her. He almost thought she envied Leota; but, as she turned back to the menu, all she said was, “Do you suppose the trout is fresh?”
It was, and could not be from any place closer than the Pyrenees. And so was the Iranian caviar they began with; and the wines were chateau-bottled Graves.
Alys ordered with the precision and arrogance of a well-practiced tourist. Calculating the cost of the meal in his head. Hake thanked his one-God-at-the-most that he Was not going to have to pay for it.
He understood at least that reason why Yosper and the others so enjoyed their work. It was difficult to remember that thrift was a virtue when you didn’t have to pay the bills—when, in fact, with their complicated juggling of computer programs and credit cards, each charge was paid unwittingly by an enemy, so that each extravagance was a blow struck against the foe.
Living like a millionaire was a new experience for Hake, and quite an immorally pleasant one. But it shriveled in contrast with the lifestyle of Sheik Hassabou. Abu Magnah was not his personal possession, but it was, every inch of it, his family’s. Their palaces were the dozen others scattered around the irrigated areas, but his was the largest, the principal, the one from which the power flowed. And what power! He had created a world, where nothing had been before but a silty, salty camel-wallow and a few dwarf trees.
The irrigation circles that gave Abu Magnah life could have been created at any time. But no one before Hassabou had been willing to pay the price. Under the scrub and rock was an ocean of fossil water—faintly brackish, yes; but cool, ample for irrigation, even drinkable if one were not fastidious. But it was nearly half a mile down. Every pint delivered to the surface represented 2,000 foot-pounds of work. Power-piggery! And on a vaster scale than Hake had ever dreamed. The sheik had found the old oasis, and bought it, and tapped its underground sea to recreate in the Empty Quarter those A1 Halwani courts and palaces he had played among as a child. All it took was energy. Energy took only money. Money enough to buy his own plutonium generator—soon to be replaced, Dicran had said, by the new solar tower going up north of the city— and pump the water up from the sea beneath the sands. Money to distill the water to drink, and to spread it in the irrigation circles around the desert, so that the great rotating radii of pipe could make the desert bloom. Money to track-truck in the marble and steel to build his palaces; to subsidize and house the Palestinians and Saudis and Bedouins who farmed his circles and staffed his city; to buy his own muezzins to call out the hours for prayer, and to build the towers they called from. Money to buy a woman he fancied, and to bribe the police to look the other way when he abducted her here. One woman? Perhaps he had a hundred. Dicran’s winks and leers were ample for a thousand.
And the money was there. For more than a generation all the gold of the Western world had sluiced into the Near East to pay for oil. Oil became capital. Capital bought hotels and auto factories and publishing companies and thousands of square miles of land, some of it in building sites in New York and Chicago and Tokyo and London. Even when the oil was gone, the capital remained and ziz rreaeriK roni replenished itself, and kept pouring money into their treasuries.
That was what
Hake was challenging.
Against that, what forces could he muster?
There were some. The pick-lock and martial-arts skills he had learned Under the Wire. The codes and cards that would let him draw on the secret funds of half a dozen major industrial powers. His own determination.
The forces were not even, but for this limited objective, the rescuing of a single prisoner—maybe they were even enough. If he was general enough to know how to deploy them.
With all that money, could he not buy himself an ally or two? A corruptible cop? A Palestinian with relatives still stuck on the West Bank? Maybe even one of Hassabou’s guards?
But how, exactly, did you go about that?
And there were only two days left.
They took their after-dinner coffee and brandy on the roof terrace, just outside the rotating turret. They were the only ones at the tables around the swimming pool, and the barman obviously thought they were crazy. The night wind was still hot. The sand made the surface of their table gritty however many times he wiped it away. But at least they could talk freely.
Alys was not in a mood to conspire- “You’ll work it out, dear,” she said, stretching languorously and gazing out toward the dark desert, “and, oh, Horny! Doesn’t this beat the hell out of Long Branch, New Jersey?”
Well, in a way it did. In some ways Hake was still very young, freshborn out of the wheelchair. But the darkness under the horizon’s stars struck him as less glamorous than threatening.
Alys lifted her snifter to her lips and then jerked it away. “What’s the matter?” Hake demanded.
She was laughing. “Parts of this place are a lot like Long Branch,” she announced. “There’s a bug in my brandy.”
