by Paul Sussman
‘Say hello to Miss Piggy,’ he said. ‘AKA the Pegasus Quantum 912 Flex-Wing Microlight. Desert travel, executive style.’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ murmured Freya, standing there with her mouth open. ‘No fucking way.’
In front of her sat what looked like a cross between a hang glider, a go-kart and a toboggan. It had a conical, two-seater pod in bright metallic pink – hence the name, she assumed – with three wheels, a propeller on the back and, attached to its tail fin, an enormous triangular sail which seemed to hover over the pod like some giant white bird.
‘No way,’ she repeated, moving around the machine, taking it all in. ‘You can actually fly this thing?’
‘Well, Alex was the ace pilot,’ Flin replied. ‘But yes, I just about know what I’m doing. Enough to get us airborne, certainly. Whether I can get us down, again … ?’
He winked and started issuing instructions, showing Freya how to attach two of the 20-litre jerry cans to the saddle-bags slung on either side of the pod while he filled the tank underneath the front seat from the remaining cans.
‘Is this going to be enough fuel?’ she asked as they worked, still barely able to believe what they were about to do.
‘Only just,’ he replied. ‘It’s a 49-litre tank. She uses about eleven litres per hour of flight and it’s a good four hours out to the Gilf, so it’s going to be tight. Especially since we’re at maximum weight capacity. We can take on some extra at Abu Ballas, though, and that should see us through without too many problems.’
‘There’s a gas station in the desert?’ she asked, incredulous.
He smiled, something faintly mischievous in the expression, as though he was enjoying her bewilderment.
‘All will be revealed when we get there,’ he said with another wink.
Once the microlight was fuelled they stowed the equipment inside the pod – maps, book, water, holdall, blankets, cool box, Flin’s black briefcase – only just managing to fit it all in. They then pushed the aircraft outside, its rubber wheels making a soft crunching sound as they rolled onto the compacted desert surface. There were two helmets sitting on the seats, with in-built headsets and intercoms. Throwing one to Freya, Flin helped her into the rear seat and strapped her in, plugging her headset’s jack into the socket beside her knee.
‘It’s all a bit cosy,’ he said, squeezing into the front seat and donning his own helmet; Freya’s legs extended to either side of him as though she was riding him piggyback. ‘And I’m afraid there’s no in-flight catering. But if you can put up with that it’s actually not such a bad way to travel.’
‘As long as you don’t kill us I’ll be happy,’ she said, feeling both nervous and strangely energized.
Flin glanced at his watch – 1.39 p.m. Flicking various switches and turning a key on the dashboard, he jabbed a finger against the starter button. The engine coughed once, twice, then roared into life, the propeller whirring around behind Freya’s head. Its rushing draught caused her shirt to ripple and flap although her helmet filtered out the worst of the noise.
‘You’re sure you know where we’re going?’ she called.
Flin made a chopping motion with his right hand.
‘South-west till we hit the Gilf Kebir,’ he said, his voice sounding through the headset. ‘Then south along its eastern edge till we find the rock. Shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure you know how to fly this thing?’
‘I guess we’ll just have to find out,’ he replied, pushing a lever on the seat beside his hip. The engine’s revs shot up and they started to move, gliding smoothly across the sand towards the clump of desert grass behind which Freya had sheltered following her escape from the oasis. After a hundred metres Flin turned them round, steering with his feet, and took them back towards the barn again. ‘We need to get the oil temperature up to 50 degrees,’ he explained, tapping one of the dials on the dashboard in front of him. ‘Otherwise the engine’s going to seize.’
They repeated the pattern for several minutes, back and forth across the sands, until eventually the gauge was showing the correct temperature. Swinging round a final time in front of the outbuilding Flin brought them to a halt. He went through some last-minute checks, then craned his head round towards her.
‘Ready?’
Freya gave him the thumbs-up. He nodded, turned to the front again and, grasping the control bar hanging from the sail above, eased the throttle forward.
‘Piggy Airways welcomes you on board this unscheduled flight to the Gilf Kebir,’ he intoned in mock pilot-speak. ‘We shall be cruising at an altitude of—’
He got no further. Just as they started to pick up speed there was a blur of movement away to their right. Like a cork from a champagne bottle, a lime-green Honda Civic – mud-spattered and badly dented – burst from the undergrowth, slewing madly on the sands before correcting itself and heading straight towards them, its driver beeping furiously. It was difficult to make out much of him, although even at this distance it was clear he was an extremely large man, his body seeming to fill the entire front of the car. Flin’s shoulders tensed and his hands tightened around the control bar, his voice crackling through the headset.
‘Angleton!’
Cyrus Angleton didn’t speak much Arabic – languages had never been his strong suit – and so it was lucky that the young woman in the Kodak shop in Qalamoun village had a reasonably good grasp of English. Doubly lucky because as well as being able to communicate with him, she also had some useful information. Fifteen minutes earlier, as she was opening up the shop after her lunch, a white Jeep had sped by and turned off onto the track out to the small oasis. There had been two people inside, she explained, a man and a woman. The woman, she was sure, was the young American who had visited the shop a couple of nights ago. Had they come back again? Angleton asked. No, the shopkeeper replied, so far as she was aware they hadn’t. Were there any other roads into or out of the oasis? No, she told him, just the one.
‘Sweet!’ he chuckled.
Wedging himself back into the hire car he sped out across the desert, the Honda bouncing and jolting on the uneven track, clouds of dust billowing behind the vehicle as though it was on fire. He reached the oasis, raced through it, pulled up in front of Alex Hannen’s house. No sign of the Cherokee. He got out, went round to the back of the building. Nothing.
‘Brodie!’ he called, hand slipping inside his jacket, clasping Missy’s grip. ‘You here?’
No response.
‘Bullshit!’
He circled round to the front of the house again, opened the door and went inside. There were open drawers in the bedroom, kitchen and study – someone had been doing some packing. Rapidly, by the looks of it.
‘They can’t be,’ he said out loud. ‘Not on their own. They can’t be.’
He went back outside and checked his watch. They were fifteen minutes ahead of him and must have spent at least ten of those in the house. If they were heading out into the desert he should still be able to spot them. He needed height, though, a vantage point from which he could survey the landscape. He looked around and spotted a rickety-looking wooden ladder propped up against the side of the building. Lumbering over to it, he started to climb. The first rung snapped beneath his weight. The second one held, albeit with a pained creak, and he continued upwards, rivulets of sweat streaming down his face, his breath coming in short, agonized rasps. He took no exercise of any sort, never had done, and what to a normal person would have been a matter-of-fact ascent was to him a major physical endeavour, involving frequent stops to allow his lungs to calm and muscles to recover from the strain of hauling so much weight upwards.
‘Christ Jesus!’ he kept gasping. ‘Christ Jesus God Almighty.’
He made it in the end, clambering his way onto the roof and stumbling across to its far edge. Shielding his eyes against the fierce afternoon sun, he gazed out across the desert, scanning the sands, seeking out the Cherokee. Nothing.
>
‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ he murmured. ‘Where are you?’
For a minute his eyes slid back and forth across the tangle of dunes and hummocks. Then, suddenly, as if he’d been struck on the back of his head, he wheeled.
‘What the fuck … ?’
From somewhere behind him the roar of a motor had shattered the torpid afternoon silence. As quickly as his legs would carry him he hurried across to the opposite side of the roof and flung his eyes up and down the oasis, trying to track down the source of the sound. Swiftly his gaze zeroed in first on a barn at the southernmost tip of the cultivated area and then, a fraction of a second later, on a large triangular sail moving out across the sand flat beyond it.
‘You bastard!’ he roared. ‘You idiot limey bastard!’
He yanked Missy from beneath his jacket, flipped off the safety catch and curled a finger around the trigger, aiming in the rough direction of the microlight. Then he thought better of it and returned the gun to his shoulder holster. Not only was it too risky at this distance, but if they clocked someone shooting at them they’d take off immediately and that would be it, chance gone. He had to get down there, he had to get closer.
The microlight had turned and was gliding back towards the outbuilding. Warming the engine, that’s what they were doing, which at least gave him a few minutes. He powered back across the roof and clambered down the ladder, puffing and panting. Reaching the ground, he headed for the hire car and jammed himself in. If there was a path or track leading from the house to the barn he hadn’t spotted it from above, and he wasn’t going to waste precious seconds searching for it now. Instead, he slammed the gearstick into first and, tyres spinning on the loose dusty surface, roared past the house and straight into the fields beyond, churning his way across them and out onto the desert. The moment he hit sand he yanked the steering wheel to the left, slewing in a wide arc before straightening up and speeding on round the perimeter of the oasis. He covered five hundred metres before a sudden, deep trench directly across his line of travel forced him to swerve left back into the cultivation. He bumped across another field, smashed though a brushwood fence and picked up some sort of cattle track that took him round the edge of an olive grove before plunging him headlong into a solid curtain of undergrowth. The momentum of the car somehow carried it through and out the other side back onto the desert. Away to his left stood the barn and in front of it the white sail of the micro-light. He brought the Honda back under control and raced towards them, steering with one hand while with the other he pulled Missy from her holster and hammered the horn.
‘Oh no you don’t, you son-of-a-bitch!’ he yelled. ‘Uncle Cyrus wants a word with you!’
Inside the microlight’s open cockpit Flin pushed the throttle full forward and grasped the control bar with both hands, his eyes flicking from the car to the dashboard air speed indicator and back again. The Honda was aiming for a point just ahead of them, clearly intending to block their line of take-off, so he angled the nose to the left, trying to buy them some extra distance. The trike rapidly picked up speed, rushing across the sands. But the car was faster. Much faster. It ate up the gap between them, closing in on them.
‘We’re not going to make it!’ cried Freya, her hand involuntarily coming out and grasping Flin’s shoulder.
He gritted his teeth and concentrated on the stretch of sand ahead. The car loomed ever larger in his peripheral vision until it seemed inevitable that the two vehicles would collide.
‘He’s going to hit us!’ she screamed.
He held off for a few more heart-stopping seconds, then – at the very last moment – pushed the control bar forward and the microlight rose gracefully into the air and over the top of the Honda as it cut directly in front of them. The trike’s wheels cleared its roof by what seemed like a matter of centimetres.
‘Kiss my arse, fat man!’ whooped Flin, easing the bar further forward and tilting it to the left, the microlight climbing and banking. Below them the car skidded to a halt and its driver clambered out, bellowing up at them, brandishing a pistol. His voice was lost in the roar of the engine and although he let off a couple of shots he appeared to do so more in frustration than with any intention of hitting them. The bullets flew well wide and his rotund form steadily dropped away as they climbed higher and headed out over the desert.
‘Who the hell was that?’ asked Freya, craning round to look down on their still-gesticulating pursuer.
‘A guy called Cyrus Angleton,’ replied Flin. ‘Works at the American Embassy. Seems he’s been tailing us, feeding information back to Girgis.’
‘You think he’ll come after us?’
‘In a Honda Civic? I’d like to see him try.’
Banking to the left he extended an arm and gave Angleton the finger.
‘See you at the Gilf!’ he called before straightening again and setting a course south-west over the sands. The car, the barn, the oasis, Dakhla, all receded behind them until they had disappeared and there was nothing but the endless rolling wastes of the Sahara.
On the ground Angleton watched until the microlight had dwindled to a minute, indeterminate speck. With a shake of the head, he returned Missy to her holster and climbed back into the car. For a moment he just sat there, staring out across the desert, punching a fist against the padding of the car’s dashboard. ‘Idiot,’ he kept repeating. ‘Stupid Limey idiot.’ Then, starting the engine, he headed back to Dakhla airport. Time to stop fucking around. Time to deal with Molly Kiernan.
CAIRO
Romani Girgis put down the cordless telephone and folded his arms, gazing out across the gardens at the back of his mansion.
‘That’s it, they’re in the air.’
Beside him Boutros Salah coughed heavily and sucked on his cigarette.
‘You sure you want to do this, Romani? Why not let—’
‘I haven’t waited twenty-three years to take a back seat now. I want to be there, see this thing with my own eyes.’
Salah nodded, took another drag on his cigarette.
‘I’ll tell Usman and Kasri,’ he said.
‘The twins?’
Salah grunted.
‘Still playing snooker. I’ll send them down. Any news on—’
‘Being dealt with as we speak,’ cut in Girgis. ‘It won’t be a problem for much longer.’
Salah nodded and disappeared into the house. For a moment Girgis stood where he was, thinking how far he’d journeyed to get to this point, how far he had climbed from those hellish early years in the cesspit of Manshiet Nasser. Then, with the smile of a man whose dream is finally about to be realized, he started down the terrace steps towards the helicopter waiting on the lawn.
OVER THE WESTERN DESERT
Her sister, she knew, had been murdered. She herself had been chased, shot at, very nearly mutilated. And yet for all that the flight out across the Sahara was one of the most wonderful experiences of Freya’s life, the all-enveloping emptiness of the desert diluting for a while her other cares and worries, leaving her curiously calm and at peace.
They flew low, no more than a couple of hundred metres above the sands. The air at that height was cooler than at ground level, but still warm, buffeting her face and torso as though she was being fanned by a giant hair-dryer. All around them the desert stretched away as far as the eye could see – a vast, unforgiving wilderness of rock and sand, unearthly in its barrenness. It was as if they had been transported to a different world, or a completely different time within our own world: an unimaginably distant era when all life had withered from the planet and what remained was the earth’s bare skeleton. There was something terrible about it, overwhelming, kilometre after kilometre of blank, searing desolation. Beautiful as well, though. Breathtakingly so, the towering sand waves and mysterious twisted rock formations possessed of a grandeur beside which even the greatest works of Man appeared drab and trivial. And while the landscape appeared devoid of life, the further they flew the more it seemed to Freya that this wa
s not, in fact, the whole story. That the desert was, in its own way, very much alive: a gargantuan sentient being whose shifting colours – one minute soft yellow, the next livid red, here blinding white, there sombre black – were curiously suggestive of changing moods and thought patterns. Its varied shapes and textures – dunes slumping into gravel flats, salt pans rearing into rock hills – likewise gave the unnerving impression that the landscape was moving, bunching and stretching itself, flexing its muscles.
Wonder, awe, fear, euphoria – Freya experienced them all. Above all, she felt the most intense sense of connection with, and yearning for, her sister. This was Alex’s world, the environment she had made her own, and the further into it they ventured, the closer, it seemed to Freya, she came to her estranged sibling. Reaching into her pocket she pulled out the passport photo she had taken from Alex’s bedside table, and the last letter her sister had sent her, which she had transferred from her old jeans when changing her clothes the night before. She clutched them in her lap and smiled, the wild, brooding collage of the Sahara unfurling slowly beneath her.
After about two hours of flying, the sun by now starting its gradual slide towards the western horizon, Flin brought them down on a gravel flat beside a small, cone-shaped hill. The hill’s lower slopes, Freya noticed as they taxied up to it, were covered with chunky sherds of broken pottery.
